Peter Diamandis and Dave Asprey contrast billionaires who fund transformative projects with those chasing personal wealth. They name Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Yuri Milner as examples of impact investors, and worry that wealth taxes could discourage breakthrough innovation funding.
My question is, how many other gazillionaires are out there betting it all? And there's a few who are betting a lot, but very few do what Elon does over and over again.
It feels like Sam Altman might be one of those, like a younger version of that.
Sam is, Sam is, is building incredible companies. Marc Benioff is doing well, I think. Yuri Milner, Eric Schmidt. But there are a lot of billionaires who are just putting their money to work to make more money or buying bigger yachts. I want to take out a full time, full page New York Times ad that says on the left hand side, thank you to all of you who are investing your money to make the world a better place and betting it over and over again. And on the other half, you know, glad you're buying bigger yachts and lots of homes.
Oh, there's a difference. And, and you know, people who are calling for wealth taxes and things like that, I'm a little worried that that would take some of the people who are working on like funding the next magical thing and just say, well, that's not going to happen now. And so I, I believe that if you're putting your money to make the world a better place and what's going to, if you have a billion dollars, it's more than you can really spend. So you got to do something and you might as well have fun making things better instead of just making money. But that's just my mindset. I feel like that's only half or maybe a third of the, the really.
Truly wealthy out there. I don't, I don't even think it's that, that big. I, I saw big Bill Gates last two weekends ago as well and, and was saying, listen, that the giving pledge, you're pledging to give away half your money to philanthropy before you die, but you know, you can't take it with you. But why not? Making an impact pledge versus a giving pledge. And this is where Tony Robbins has done such an extraordinary job, right? And Tony keeps on making huge bets as well. He didn't say, I'm just going to give money away. He's like, no, I'm going to feed a billion people. And then I'm going to feed 100 billion people. I'm going to plant 100 million trees. It's like calling your shot. And I think making it measurable and publicly claiming what you're going to do is such a massive differentiator.
